Exploring concepts of representation conveyed in and by
The Help
through the phenomenological approach of reader-response theory
– A bachelor thesis by Tania Havris Lind –
first published in 2013 – revised in 2020
PART V – THE ‘RECREATIVE’ EFFECTS OF READING REPRESENTATION
On another matter, The Help illustrates how extensive the secondary readers’ response is towards Help e.g. the ‘awareness of existence’ it conveys as well as the maids’ artistic representation of the secondary readers in it.
It is evident that the secondary readers have never before been confronted with the life of the women behind the white uniform (which carries the same symbolism as the title of Franz Eanon’s novel Black Skin, White Masks), or rather with the representations of themselves from the point of view of those who serve them. The mindset of the majority of the Jackson Junior League’s women has been challenged by the encounter with the ‘alien thoughts’ of the maids through the process of reading Help. Up until the publication of Help, the world perspective of the secondary readers has been steadfast, despite of all the events, the tragedies and the constant daily presence of the ‘Other’ in their lives.
The Help gives the contemporary reader a chance to observe how the secondary readers are turned from being somewhat oblivious and ignorant towards the existence of the human beings behind the white uniforms to insidiously being made aware of the maids’ backgrounds as well as their perception of their employers e.g. the Caucasian women of the Jackson Junior League.
To formulate the reading experience of the secondary readers in a more simple manner: when the women of the Jackson Junior League open up the cover of Help, they are not only finding a whole new perspective of the world that surrounds them, but are also confronted with a textual representation of themselves; as if they were looking at an altered image of their own reflection in a mirror.
Iser uses a very similar metaphor, when he explains how the reader’s experience of a ‘text … reflect[s] … [the reader’s] own disposition’ and thus, through a collaboration between the ‘artistic’ and the ‘esthetic’ element, creates ‘the literary work’ that inevitably mirrors the disposition of the individual reader. What the contemporary reader then experiences when reading about the secondary readers’ response to Help is ‘the … paradoxical situation in which the [secondary] reader[s] … [are] forced to reveal aspects of … [themselves] in order to experience a reality which is different from … [their] own’.
The contemporary reader is placed in a privileged position that enables the contemporary reader to not only experience the change of reality occurring in the consciousness of the secondary readers when confronted with the textual representation of their personas, but is also (through that same experience) made aware of the esthetic action occurring within while reading The Help. As a result, The Help produces a dual awareness within the contemporary reader, which (in the same words of critic John McLeod about the core concept of postcolonialism) leads to the contemporary reader challenging him- or herself ‘to think again and question some of the assumptions that underpin both what … [s/he] read[s] and how … [s/he] read[s]’.
Meanwhile, the attention of the contemporary reader is also drawn towards the consequences of the insidious altering of the secondary readers’ reality that Help imposes upon them through their individual realisation process. As mentioned, the women of Jackson have appeared either oblivious to or simply dismissed the human element hidden behind the white uniform of the maids. Despite the fact that the secondary readers are continuously made aware of the horrible events that take place both in their hometown as well as the rest of the South, they consciously or unconsciously choose to ‘turn [it] off’, just like Mrs. Phelan does when she finds Skeeter and their African American maid Pascagoula watching the transmission of John F. Kennedy ordering the governor of Mississippi to let the young African American James Meredith enter the University of Mississippi: an all-white university.
Nevertheless, the moment the secondary readers begin to read the pages of Help, they are lured into a literary space that depicts the ‘unfamiliar’ and untold version of the South. Moreover, the secondary readers are unable to ‘turn off’ their basic need to form ‘a consistent pattern’ of the textual reality that Help offers, which eventually forms a ‘gestalt’ (a German psychological term used to describe a set of things, such as a person’s thoughts or experiences, that is considered as a single system which is different from the individual thoughts, experiences, etc. within it or formulated differently; a way in which the entirety of something represents a greater sum than the individual parts of which it exists) within them e.g. the secondary readers’ individual way of ‘grouping together the written parts of the text.’
In his phenomenological approach, Iser explains that the ‘gestalt must inevitably be colored by … [the readers] own characteristic selection process’, which means that it is the individual background and perception of reality that determine which experience the secondary readers get from Help. Subsequently, Iser emphasises that the ‘gestalt’ shall not be regarded as ‘the [only] true meaning of the text’; but that it ‘is an individual act of seeing-things-together and only that’.
Representation and the ‘forming of illusions’
However, before the secondary readers in The Help are able to comprehend the reality of Help, as well as form expectations to it, the author e.g. Skeeter must form certain ‘illusion[s]’ within the artistic framework of Help in order to intrigue the imagination of the secondary reader e.g. by changing the names of every person, town and place that are mentioned in Help without altering anything else about the stories and thus intriguing the curiosity of the secondary readers, who will notice the resemblance between Help and their lives.
In addition, the mystery and ambiguity attached to the title Help undoubtedly kindle the imagination of the secondary readers. However, the creation of illusions is a great balancing act for the author; if ‘the formation of illusions’ is too solid, the imagination of the secondary reader will become superfluous and thus removes an essential active element in the reading process. On the other hand, if the ‘formation of illusions’ is too weak or even non-existent, the imagination of the secondary reader is not intrigued and then leaves to a state of inactiveness, which will prove to have the same unprofitable outcome as with the solid ‘formation of illusions’. Iser argues that it is ‘through the illusions, [that] the experience offered by the text becomes [both] accessible [and ‘readable’] to us’.
But if the building of illusions is essential to the process of making ‘the unfamiliar world of the text’ familiar to the readers, it is my argument that the same theory of illusion-building can in some cases be applied to the representational act done by the author of an artistic text. In the artistic process, Skeeter has to create a shield of illusions around the maids’ stories in order to protect the identity of the maids as well as her own. Skeeter’s act of representation functions as a protective veil that causes the secondary readers to unconsciously identify themselves with the reality of the maids, because Skeeter’s representations blur the origin of the perspectives that they are reading. Paradoxically, without the literary illusions created by Skeeter’s representation, the voices of the maids would very likely and quite literally be smothered and thus forever silenced.
Simultaneously, it is only through the representational illusions that the individual consciousness of the secondary readers is altered; readers who, up until their encounter with Help, have been in a state of either denial or oblivion to the changes happening around them. What Help does is form a space in which a change of subjection occurs to the secondary readers; their interpretations of reality become ‘subjected to [the] same interplay of illusion-forming and illusion-breaking’, which set in motion ‘a recreative process’ of their own reality and consciousness. As a consequence, the secondary readers go from being in the subjecting end of the scale of representation to being subjected to representations of themselves; both to their own esthetic representation, as well as to the maids’ artistic representation of them.
Subsequently, a consideration of the contemporary reader’s position in correlation to the duality of illusions imposed on him or her by the ‘formation of illusions’ present by The Help and Help must be taken into account. The contemporary reader is subjected to his/her own process of recreation, as well as to the recreational process of the secondary readers. This results in a unique disposition in which the contemporary reader is able to comprehend the multiple perspective represented in The Help, which then result in a far more complex altering of their reality and perhaps to an even better understanding of some of the pitfalls that are attached to the act of representation; instead of reading a singular ‘I which … is not … [his or her own]’, s/he is reading multiple versions of ‘I’, which, as a consequence, offer the contemporary reader a more nuanced approach to the concepts of representation.
As a result, I would argue that the contemporary reader actually generates a better contemplation of the representational presence in The Help and the ideology of the postcolonial aspects, which it represents, while simultaneously adapting the voice of the silenced subject into his or her reality, which, in my opinion ultimately shortens the gap between ‘the familiar’ and ‘the unfamiliar’; between ‘them’ and ‘us’-way of thinking.
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PUBLISHING MY REVISED BACHELOR THESIS…
I wrote my bachelor thesis in the fall of 2013. I had become a mom for the first time in the spring, and my son was just a few months old when I started writing my paper with guidance from my lector Eva Rask Knudsen.
I fell in love with postcolonialism from the first time I was introduced to the subject during the second or third semester. The whole notion of how acts of colonialism have shaped (and still shapes) the world we live in today captivated my interest instantly. The infatuation arose when I was introduced to The Theory of Knowledge on the fifth or sixth semester, and I immediately felt the need to find a way to combine my two passions in my upcoming bachelor thesis – and so I did.
I have decided to publish my bachelor thesis on my blog, because the combination and understanding of both postcolonialism and reader-response theory is still very much a part of my professional foundation when I work with communication, as well as my personal interests for how we talk about people around us – on both a national and global scale.
Much have happened since 2013 when I first handed in my bachelor thesis, so I have used some time to revise the thesis to make it more contemporary. The core is still intact – I’ve merely brushed the exterior up a bit.
I hope you will enjoy the revised version of my thesis, and please leave any constructive thoughts in the comment box below.
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